This happened six weeks ago but I just heard about it. My seminal ex (how's that for a phrase!) was the Polly in "Polly and the Valley Boys," with Bruce (i.e. Utah) Phillips one of the Valley Boys, in the 60s and for a spell they were the house band at the Weiser Idaho Old Time Fiddlers' Contest. A great adventure was looking for him in upper state NY one summer. Got to hear him, and singing with the ex, several times in the home environment. Rosalie Sorrells was another one of this Salt Lake City 60s crowd, a kind of mentor for the ex. Rosalie and Bruce were the future big folk names to come out of that. The ex took the academic, not the prof singing, route.
Wobbly Bard, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73
Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor. Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it. |
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